The Short Lifespan of a Rumor

by Patrick Newman (Nov 23, 2010)

On Friday, I found an article that I liked and "tweeted" it, which my friends at MLB Trade Rumors then picked up and wrote a post
on. Within a half hour of the MLBTR post, journalist Nick Piecoro had
refuted the information in the original article with one of the
principles of the story.

What was the story? A summary and some speculation about the Diamondbacks interest in Lotte reliever Hiroyuki Kobayashi.
The story included a quote from D-Backs GM Kevin Towers, one that he
made in late September: "We have strong interest in Japanese pitchers.
Once we size up the market, if we decide that Japanese pitchers like
Hiro Kobayashi fit our team we'll move to acquire them." The article
went on to say that the Diamondbacks have "already prepared a contract
of around $3m over two years," and explain the team's bullpen issues and
Towers' experience acquiring Akinori Otsuka.

It seemed plausible enough, and still does, but got denied pretty
quickly. Two things jump out at me here, both related to Twitter. The
first is the speed at which this took place - from the time I saw the
article it only took a tweet, a blog post, a text message and another
tweet to shoot the news down. The second is the limitations of Twitter
as a vehicle for information. One of Twitter's founding fathers, Evan
Williams, recently said
"we've lowered the barriers to publishing almost as far as they can
go." While that's true, the 140 character format of Twitter messages
isn't conducive to including a lot of qualifying contextual information.
Twitter is a great way to build an audience and communicate with
readers, but it turns out that it's not terribly compatible with my
style of making information available.